Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 10:56:38 01/28/00
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On January 28, 2000 at 12:07:17, David Paulowich wrote: >On January 28, 2000 at 07:27:54, Enrique Irazoqui wrote: > >>There is a degree of uncertainty, but I don't think you need 1000 matches of 200 >>games each to have an idea of who is best. >> >>Fischer became a chess legend for the games he played between his comeback in >>1970 to the Spassky match of 1972. In this period of time he played 157 games >>that proved to all of us without the hint of a doubt that he was the very best >>chess player of those times. >> >>Kasparov has been the undisputed best for many years. From 1984 until now, he >>played a total of 772 rated games. He needed less than half these games to >>convince everyone about who is the best chess player. >> >>This makes more sense to me than the probability stuff of your Qbasic program. >>Otherwise we would reach the absurd of believing that all the rankings in the >>history of chess are meaningless, and Capablanca, Fischer and Kasparov had long >>streaks of luck. >> >>You must have thought along these lines too when you proposed the matches >>Tiger-Diep and Tiger-Crafty as being meaningful, in spite of not being 200,000 >>games long. >> >>Enrique > > >I think we need to treat men and machines differently here. I can accept a >20 game match between two human players as conclusive, for the year it was >played. And a 400 game match between two computers would convince me. >As long as the computers have a completely different way of playing, >looking at thousands of times more positions than human players do, they >may have to play much longer matches to produce truly convincing results. I think both positions are not correct. We see an experiment and assume it is repeatable because it repeated. I flip a penny twenty times and it comes up heads 18 out of 20. What are the odds it will be a head on the next flip? It is 0.5 out of 1, the same as if it had been 18 tails out of 20. We watch a brilliant game and think that we can draw from that that player x is much stronger than player y. The truth of the matter is that we probably understand the play of neither x nor y since they are hundreds of times better than we are anyway. The ability of a player, whether man or machine, can be judged rationally only by a purely mathematical basis. Observing a few games and drawing a conclusion is the same sort of science as burning witches and eating mercury to live forever. Seemed like a good thing to do at the time, but it did not have the scientific basis it purported to possess.
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